This is Not Art Festival

This is Not Art (TiNA) is a national festival focusing on emerging arts and artists that takes place in Newcastle, New South Wales, each year over the October long weekend. The festival was established in 1998 and has subsequently become a well-respected, leading independent contemporary arts festival in Australia. TiNA is dedicated to the work and ideas of artistic communities not generally included in other major Australian arts festivals or institutions. It provides a platform for emerging artists to have their work seen and to experiment in a safe environment where risk-taking is encouraged.

Headjam have been collaborating with TiNA for over a decade and in 2022 we were asked to help market and promote the festival for the first time since emerging from a post-COVID world.

Promote TiNA as a regional flagship event.

• Emerging performers and artists.
• Those interested in contemporary arts, whether seasoned art lovers or new to the art world.

Pulling back the curtain to make the festival more accessible.

“I really enjoyed experiencing some weird and wonderful performances and art forms for the first time.”

We had built the foundation of a strong and utilitarian brand for the festival back in 2015 which after seven years was still relevant and strong. With a limited budget to market the festival in 2022 we thought of interesting ways to engage with a visiting audience and to showcase a physical presence of TiNA. Mindful of a limited promotional budget, a long-term promotional content strategy was developed to cost-effectively promote the event for subsequent years.

The concept comes from the origins of This is Not Art and the urban legend that tells us of a festival that was inspired and named after a piece of graffiti on the side of a building in Newcastle. Echoing the intrigue of the original graffiti, we will built This is Not Art ‘monoliths’ and placed them in various locations around Newcastle reinforcing TiNA’s connection to the city. The monoliths also doubled as way finding signage around the city for the events, as well as used to produce a promotional video to promote the 2023 year event and beyond.

For the program, we worked on overhauling the organisation’s digital technology, building a website on an updated and best in class CMS that worked as an event organiser – and kept changes to event times or locations up to date in one location. With over 50 events throughout the festival and around 10 event producers, having a process to submit revisions to the program was important. We built a mobile-friendly submission process that gave busy program organisers the ability to submit changes to events whilst on the go. This was then texted to the website admins for the festival, who worked instantly on updating the content as well as updating the social media assets and posting the changes to the relevant TiNA socials. Festival goers were able to view the program online and see in real time highlighted ‘updated’ event tags added that showed any time or location changes, or any cancellations.

Social media also played a big part in the promotion of the festival. Using Instagram’s collaborator feature, we were able to distribute the social posts to the artists’ feeds as well as the festivals’, generating a huge amount of organic distribution. We also encouraged all artists to share on their Instagram stories other programming they thought was interesting throughout the festival. By doing this we built a swell of hype and engagement throughout the festival period, with very little digital marketing expenditure. Secondly, we created a TikTok channel for the festival, distributing news to a different audience for the first time. This generated around 60,000 plays across the content, which for a new channel with no previous use or engagement was a great result.

In 2022 the festival attracted 3,654 visitors to Newcastle. 48% of these were interstate, 17% were intrastate and 3% were from overseas, with the remaining visitors local Novocastrians. Based on Destination NSW statistics and an Economic Impact Study conducted by IER, the direct economic impact of the festival was that it generated $579,786 to the local and state based economies. The entire festival budget (including all marketing and artists’ fees) for the 2022 event was $60,000, meaning TiNA generated a 9 to 1 return on investment (ROI) – for every dollar spent the festival generated over $9 for the local and state economy.